The Miraculous Eyebrow

The Miraculous Eyebrow

I, for one, have never attempted this experiment. Nevertheless it is telling.

"Shave your eyebrow, just the one. And watch it grow right back."

Obviously the trick is not in the timescale, since it would take a few weeks.

The real trick is in the contemplation of the regrowth of the eyebrow. So complete is its enaction of what it was, that the pair would never ever seem to have been parted at all.

Contemplate.
Can evolutionary genetics account for this complete fulfilment of what was?

We know that hair in different parts of the body behave differently, and that their fineness in one part might be coded for separately from their coarseness in another part of your body.

We know that DNA, the very stuff of our genetic code, provides a template for protein expression and the relative abundance of one protein, over another, in one type of hair follicle, over another in another part of the body, might account for different tensile strengths and different grades of brittleness.
And that this might account for there being short hair and long hair in different parts of your body, and even different thicknesses of hair types.

But the eyebrow is miraculous.

It grew back and then stopped growing. Or it grew at a moderate pace and then it's pace of growth slowed to the imperceptible.

Either way it's hair grew until it had formed completely the shape of your previous eyebrow and then stopped or slowed.

How did it know when to slow or stop growth?

How did each individual hair follicle in your eyebrow know when it's desired length had been reached?

Although I don't generally like to labour a point, I feel that I need to here for the devil is in the detail.

For if we take the materialist point, and the genetic point, then each individual hair follicle in your eyebrow would have coded within it it's particular protein composition.

And if its matter of growth was given by the brittleness of its composition then wouldn't it be a probabilistic expression of that particular nature. Might not one overgrow, and another undergrow.

Still more incredible is its growing at a moderate rate, and then slowing the rate of growth when a particular length had been achieved.

The materialist will say that it doesn't know when to stop, and that it is just our projection of ourselves on to it.

That we know, and that it can't and so doesn't. Sounds a bit dogmatic doesn't it?

The funny thing is that that is not how rationality works.
Rationality moves from known to unknown and not in the reverse direction.

And whilst we know that we know, perhaps the very definition of consciousness, to impart ignorance to other things without proof of such is a movement in a reverse direction. It is an assault on the very essence of rationality itself.

The foundation of Modern Science ASSUMES that objects that are non-living, and even some that might be living, do not and cannot know.

Modern Science tells us that "genes" are not living and do not know.
That the hair follicles in an eyebrow are governed by such not-knowing genes.

Then how so the EYE-BROW?

Of course another explanation might be that the eyebrow has purpose and knows its purpose and seeks to fulfil its purpose.

Crazy as it may seem, it explains the thing in a language which is more readily rational, in that we can relate to it more easily than dead robotics, than current Science.

In fact this current of thought was at the very foundations of Scientific thinking, being known as Aristotlian. For the Greeks held that stones, and all matter, fell not because of seeking decreasing potentials within a gravitational field, but because that was what they did in seeking their nature. A purposive understanding of a purposive World.

That this view of reality held sway for long is no surprise, but what is surprising is that Science developed in the way that it did.
But that is a subject of another blog.


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Location:Athens

2nd blog in the series: 

https://shafeesthoughts.blogspot.com/2013/08/why-greeks-didn-do-science.html?m=1